H28.0618 Lecture 4 Credits
Instructor(s): Vorlicky, Jeffreys, Turner
This course is offered in the three sections:
Major Playwrights: Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks
Adrienne Kennedy’s experimentations in form and content since the 1960s situate her work among the most significant in the United States’s modern and postmodern movements. From her Obie-winning Funnyhouse of a Negro and A Movie Star has to Star in Black and White to The Ohio State Murders and Sleep Deprivation Chamber, Kennedy is peerless in her use of stage space, time, and (autobiographical) characterology. This course mines the rich, original dynamics that exist in the theatrical and intellectual “intertextual dialogues” between Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks, arguably the most innovative playwright of her generation. Among Parks’s plays under consideration are Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Venus, The America Play and the Pulitzer Prize winning Top Dog/Under Dog.
Major Playwrights: Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot set the stage for a career that saw Samuel Beckett become one of the most controversial and least understood playwrights of the 20th century. A key innovator of dramatic structure, content and theme, this multi-media class explores his dramatic works (and some of his non dramatic ones) as it attempts to put the man, his work and theatre into the historical and critical context of the last half of the 1900s. A major figure of the Theatre of the Absurd, this class also looks at other playwrights in this circle from Ionesco to Genet, and Beckett’s legacy on theatre artists writing and working today including Edward Albee and Mac Wellman. For further information on this class visit www.nyu.edu/classes/jeffreys/beckett.
Major Playwrights: August Wilson and Company
The entire body of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson’s Broadway-produced plays will be examined with special emphasis on his historical perspective, his exploration of black identity, his use of Africanisms, his jazz and blues inspirations, and his representation of the supernatural. In conjunction with his plays, we will also study the drama of three other American playwrights: Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Alice Childress whose works provide additional perspectives on the 20th century America Wilson has chosen to portray. By refracting the American experience through the lenses of playwrights who differ from Wilson by race and/or gender, a multifocal image of 20th century America emerges.
